All the coins that could be found were seized and destroyed. Then, the fugitive 1933 double eagles became the focus of a relentless Secret Service investigation spearheaded by the man who had put away Al Capone. The government thought they had destroyed them all-but they were wrong.Ī few escaped, purloined in a crime-an inside job-that wasn't discovered until 1944. In 1937, along with countless millions of other gold coins, they were melted down into faceless gold bars and sent to Fort Knox. As the economy teetered on the brink of total collapse, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first act as president, assumed wartime powers while the nation was at peace and in a 'swift, staccato action' unprecedented in United States history recalled all gold and banned its private ownership.īut the United States Mint continued, quite legally, to strike nearly a half million 1933 double eagles that were never issued and were deemed illegal to own. In 1933 the hopes of America dimmed in the darkness of the Great Depression, and gold-the nation's lifeblood-hemorrhaged from the financial system.

In 1905, at the height of the exuberant Gilded Age, President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned America's greatest sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens-as he battled in vain for his life-to create what became America's most beautiful coin. The most valuable ounce of gold in the world, the celebrated, the fabled, the infamous 1933 double eagle, illegal to own and coveted all the more, it has been sought with passion by men of wealth and with steely persistence by the United States government for more than a half century-it shouldn't even exist but it does, and its astonishing, true adventures read like 'a composite of The Lord of the Rings and The Maltese Falcon' ( The New York Times).

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